Dolby, Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, and Dolby E are trademarks of Dolby Laboratories Licensing Corporation. Dolby Laboratories provides proprietary implementations of AC-3 and E-AC-3 known as Dolby Digital and Dolby Digital Plus, respectively.
Audio data processing units typically operate in a blind fashion and do not pay attention to the processing history of audio data that occurs before the data is received. This may work in a processing framework in which a single entity does all the audio data processing and encoding for a variety of target media rendering devices while a target media rendering device does all the decoding and rendering of the encoded audio data. However, this blind processing does not work well (or at all) in situations where a plurality of audio processing units are scattered across a diverse network or are placed in tandem (i.e., chain) and are expected to optimally perform their respective types of audio processing. For example, some audio data may be encoded for high performance media systems and may have to be converted to a reduced form suitable for a mobile device along a media processing chain. Accordingly, an audio processing unit may unnecessarily perform a type of processing on the audio data that has already been performed. For instance, a volume leveling unit may perform processing on an input audio clip, irrespective of whether or not the same or similar volume leveling has been previously performed on the input audio clip. As a result, the volume leveling unit may perform leveling even when it is not necessary. This unnecessary processing may also cause degradation and/or the removal of specific features while rendering the content of the audio data.